A statement from Saint Francis Hospice CEO

As the world faces unprecedented times amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the future of Saint Francis Hospice does too. The Hospice ‘s CEO, Pam Court, is calling for your support more than ever before as they continue to care for those who need them in increasingly restricted conditions.

Our priority is to keep everyone safe. We’ve had to make some crucial decisions about how we provide our vital services in such difficult times. We need to ensure our charity remains financially supported so that we can protect patients, their loved ones, and also our workforce.

Our Hospice is already feeling the effects of the coronavirus in the wake of postponing all fundraising events that involve large gatherings. Unfortunately, our charity retail stores will also suffer.

We had multiple fundraising activities planned in our bid to reach our fundraising target of £7.8m this year. The outcome of these decisions was upsetting for all of us, but they were decisions that we simply had to make.

We must now find other ways to fundraise as we prepare ourselves for the inevitable: a decline in income. We’ve already seen some lovely examples of people discovering different ways to support our Hospice. Our Patron’s Circle founder has amazingly sourced us some masks from Hong Kong. Another supporter recently delivered a mask-fitting training session to our staff.

We are supporting staff to work from home wherever possible and practical. Our fantastic volunteers who are self-isolating have promised they will be back. We will keep in touch and look forward to seeing them again soon.

We’ll continue to keep everyone updated with the latest health advice and changes to how we look after people in the local community who need our specialist services — 24 hours a day.

We urge you to stay in touch, support us where you can, and appeal to keep us in your hearts and minds as you are in ours.

It’s with thanks to the incredible love and kindness of our supporters that we celebrated our 35th birthday last summer. Together, we will pull through this to secure the next 35 years of outstanding hospice care.